It’s 7:34 am Wednesday morning.
Here’s what the first 2 hours and 45 minutes of my day looked like with AI...
Up at 4:45 (ugh...)
In the gym before 5:30.
Four intervals of sprints... a few minutes of recovery and off to Starbucks.
The sun’s still not up.
I love the early mornings. They are by far my most productive few hours.
For the last hour and a half, I checked on a client’s bestseller launch... he hit #1 overnight.
I grabbed a screenshot and texted him (I hope he’s got notifications off... it’s early!)
Sent a few messages to the team to get things moving.
And assigned a project to Claude to sort out.
Last week I shared a behind the scenes look at BookFlow, our production management app.
We’re a week later, and the team has now been 100% running on BookFlow for 4 weeks.
We just shut down the legacy system (saving $10k per year).
That’s cool, but today, I want to show you the real gains we’re experiencing from AI, so that you can see how to get these gains for yourself.
The AI Acceleration Phenomenon
In June, we did what I believe will be some of the most important work the company will ever do.
We stopped tinkering with AI for a month and we sorted out our data.
Like most businesses that have been around for 16+ years, we had a tangled mess of information.
Client files were well organized, but in almost every other area of the business we had...
old stuff mixed with current stuff
folder systems that drifted over time
file naming conventions that were inconsistently applied (the bane of my existence!)
Our 5 shared Google Drives functioned, but they were a bit like that closet you keep meaning to clean out, while continuing to pile stuff in it.
So in June we said, time to clean house.
We reorganized every shared drive.
We built databases for frequently used and updated information (testimonials, social media content, events, and a few other things).
It was a pain in the rear, but we now have very clear context to give to AI.
And we’re seeing the acceleration that is possible as a result.
Before, we’d have an AI idea, then need to stop, and find all of the context to give it before it could work.
No longer.
Now, we have an idea, and we get AI involved.
It can find things easily on its own.
And it’s not just easier for AI (and us) to find things...
The AI can now be confident that what it finds is current and useful.
Before, it might find the right thing, but it would also find old versions of docs or spreadsheets, and need us to sort it out.
That’s been eliminated.
BookFlow is one example of what we’ve done since June.
How we deliver marketing strategy for our book writing clients is the latest.
Marketing for most small businesses is hard. They don’t have the expertise or the team to do it most of the time.
Kind of ironic since, as Druker famously said, there are only two profit centers in a business: marketing and innovation. Everything else is cost.
But it is true.
So, we’ve worked very hard to build marketing systems that our clients can actually implement.
Even then, it can be challenging for them.
I’ve been working on simplified versions of our marketing systems for clients since January. We tested a few approaches, but I didn’t think it moved the needle enough to roll them out.
This week, I pointed AI at the problem.
In one day, I was able to work with AI to take every marketing strategy we teach, and build a system that tailors it to every client.
The result is paint-by-numbers checklist we can hand to a client and their team.
Custom for them, calibrated to their goals, their current capabilities, and their team size.
In a day, we went from one-size-fits-all to a clear, bespoke marketing approach for every client.
But wait there’s more...
In true Billy Mays fashion, there is more...
We work with great business owners as clients. And many of them come in with little or no existing marketing.
Websites that are sales prevention departments.
Social media profiles that haven’t been updated in years.
Feeds that they started, posted once, and left as a ghost town.
In the past, we’d tell clients they should update these things, but we couldn’t get detailed.
Now, in a day, we created a deep-dive analysis tool for a client’s website, and every social profile they have. All based on our own internal analysis criteria, built from 30+ years of marketing expertise.
We’re able to give them a detailed diagnosis and action plan for what’s up-to-par and what needs work. Here’s an example…
Maybe you’re saying “Great Steve, AI can already do a marketing report.”
Sure, generic AI can do that.
But what we created in a day, building on our accumulated context (our enterprise wisdom) is richer, and more specifically tuned to our clients than anything I’ve seen out of generic AI.
Hang onto that idea for a moment...
(This is an excerpt from a real client analysis. Client-identifying details redacted.)
Not only did we increase the value we’re able to deliver to a client, we did something important for the business...
We laid out a roadmap for other services the client might need that we can offer.
We give them the plan, and they can do one of four things with it...
Do nothing.
Do it themselves.
Get another firm to do it.
Work with our team to implement it.
In one workday, we not only created a system that serves the client better and delivers significantly more value to clients than we delivered on Monday...
We also opened up the opportunity to extend our engagement with the client and solve some real problems for them.
Everyone wins.
Are you using AI to increase client value or answer your emails?
Your AI Acceleration Opportunity
Now let’s focus on you...
If you’re still using AI like it’s 2025, you’re falling behind.
The acceleration is real and increasing.
You have years, maybe decades of accumulated wisdom inside your business.
That’s why people have hired you.
Before it was often hard and manual to translate that into client value.
You had to do the analysis, write the report, design the client implementation, build the team that could take it off of you...
All of that friction is gone.
But there is foundation work to do to ride the AI acceleration.
Value has shifted from labor to outcome.
That requires new ways of storing, accessing, and activating company wisdom.
It requires recognizing that you have unique company wisdom. (You do.)
It requires new workflows... new team structures... new offerings.
Are you investing the time, energy, and money in reimagining your business that’s required in this moment?
Steve “accelerated” Gordon
P.S. I’ve opened up time to work with 2 clients this month to help you turn AI into real, bankable results. Interested? Email me and let’s chat: steve@milliondollarauthor.io
very helpful information,Pat
I am taking some time off to focus on my presidential seminar with you.